This book is a welcome addition to the body of scholarship that positions post-Reformation Catholics into the mainstream of English social and political history. Eilish Gregory’s central question, how political change affected Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s, unites three distinct yet related topics: the politics of the English Revolution, how the state used the sequestration process to deal with noncompliant subjects, and how Catholics negotiated with Interregnum regimes. Throughout, Gregory focuses on Catholic experiences of the period and its political tumult. She concludes that Catholics adapted to the challenges of the revolutionary period, and that rather than devastating Catholic estates and livelihoods, sequestration allowed them to survive.
This study is based on a range of primary source types: petitions from Catholic gentry, pamphlets, newspapers, family papers, and state papers. Gregory has included a wide geographic capture in the petitions, from counties with robust Catholic populations as well as counties with meagre ones, in order to trace the themes that emerged from Catholic petitions throughout the realm. This methodology allows for comparison of two key factors: first, Catholic experiences of sequestration and compounding; second, the degree of implementation and enforcement of anti-Catholic policies in counties of varied size and Catholic demographics.
As Gregory notes, studies of sequestration are not new, but none thus far have focused on the Catholic experience of that process. Over six substantive chapters, Gregory unpacks sequestration during the Civil Wars and republican period, discusses the role of print culture in sequestration, explains Catholic experiences of sequestration and the role of networks in the revolutionary period, and the relationship between Catholics and the state during the republican period. Throughout, the author defines specialist terms, which is vital for accessibility for readers new to the study of Catholic history or the history of the Civil Wars.
From the mid-sixteenth century, sequestration was one tool the English state used to pressure Catholics into conformity with the Protestant church. Under Charles I, it grew into a significant generator of royal income with nationwide operations. The outbreak of civil war prompted an overhaul of this process as Parliament expanded it beyond its focus on religious nonconformists to include subjects whom Parliament declared instigators of war: in other words, Royalists. This reformation of sequestration succeeded in two key ways. First, by raising substantial and much-needed revenue for the Parliamentary side; second, by taking revenue from Royalists and instead directing those resources to Parliament. This expansive application of sequestration and compounding was successful enough to become a long-term solution throughout the revolutionary period. Sequestration continued to adapt in response to Parliamentary requirements throughout the republican period, during which delinquents became the main target of sequestration policy and practice, as ‘the political enemies of the Commonwealth’ (p. 68).
Print media played a crucial role in sequestration and compounding by making the public aware of how the process was supposed to work and, perhaps more importantly, how it operated in practice. Printed legislation, pamphlets, essays, and newspapers provided Catholics with information about how to navigate the process and helped county committees to function despite the slow pace of communication from the central government. The wider debate about sequestration and Catholics was revealed through print culture, and with it the larger context of politics, Catholic factionalism, and articulation of grievances and corruption. Print culture allowed Catholics who petitioned to compound for their estates to formulate strategies as they wrote those petitions.
During the Interregnum, one of the most significant concerns for Catholics was to protect their estates. As they had since the late sixteenth century, Catholics accomplished this through a range of strategies, which Gregory unpacks in her analysis of Catholics’ experiences of sequestration and composition. She finds that some officials were ‘deliberately destructive towards Catholic petitioners’ but that on the whole, Catholics were not specifically discriminated against (pp. 96, 132). The petitions allow us to see the strategies Catholics used to persuade officials, such as the swearing of oaths of loyalty to parliament, claiming that they had been coerced into fighting for the king, invoking claims of religious persecution, and producing witnesses to attest to their social and political creditworthiness.
Gregory’s analysis of Catholic networks reveals that in practice, Catholics and Protestants found ways to get along. Kinship connections were a first line of defence, but Catholics had to remain part of the local community and social networks if they were to survive this tumultuous period. Through networks, Catholics enlisted the support and patronage of Protestants who helped with petitions for compounding, quietly conveyed confiscated lands back to Catholics, and stood as witnesses to a Catholic’s good character or social credit. Fine-grained studies like Gregory’s are crucial to our understanding of how Catholic networks functioned across a range of settings, including how those social phenomena operated during wartime. This study demonstrates that despite faction, war, and substantial political upheaval, Catholics were not cut off from English society but remained deeply embedded in it, politically and socially.
There is a wider significance to this study that reaches beyond Catholics and even beyond the Civil Wars. This is the first book to treat the English Civil Wars from the Catholic perspective and to thus make England’s Catholic population part of the larger story of the Civil Wars. Gregory has united literature on Catholics, durable legal processes, and the English Revolution. This book is in conversation with a wider corpus of works than what Gregory might realize, such as Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes’s work on the gentry. Integration of some network theory would have helped to provide additional support for Gregory’s arguments about Catholic networks. Still, the author has successfully drawn together a vast array of scholarship and made a substantial contribution to that body of knowledge.
Gregory’s important book begins a long-overdue analysis of how English Catholics experienced nearly two decades of revolution and republican rule. The book should be required reading for advanced undergraduates and post-graduate students and will be very useful to specialists in the field. We can hope that other scholars will continue Gregory’s analysis into the experience of Catholics during this significant period in British history.
